by Kristie Cook
“Working! Where else?”
I snorted. “Well, I’m here, and you’re not. Thought you would be since, you know, this is where you work.”
Mason’s voice fell quieter and softer. “Why are you there?”
“Like I said, my mama’s here. She’s in ICU.”
“Oh, Bex, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I kind of panicked when you weren’t here with no note and everything left out. I didn’t think to check my messages, just to call you right away to make sure you were okay.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. He had a funny way of showing his concern.
“I’m fine. I don’t know about Mama, though.”
“Go home and take care of your man,” Sissy said. She’d resigned herself to the idea of Mason and me as a couple when I told her I was moving in with him. About the same time she went to Ty’s fight. She swore up and down they were just friends, and that made sense because he’d been her friend as long as he’d been mine, but I wondered if she wanted it to be more … if she weren’t spending all her time with Mama and all. Not that she would tell me.
I covered the phone. “I want to stay here with you. You don’t need to be alone.”
“I’m goin’ home, too. The nurse said I should. I need to get some things for Mama, and I may as well grab a few hours of sleep while I’m there. There’s nothing we can do here.”
“I’ll be home in a few,” I told Mason, then hung up. “Are you sure? I can go with you.”
She gave me a weird look. “Why would you do that? I’m a big girl. I can handle picking up Mama’s jammies and book. Go on. Sounds like Mason needs you. And maybe he can tell you more about what’s goin’ on with Mama.”
I nodded, and then gave her a hug. We held each other for a long moment before finally breaking apart and heading downstairs to our cars. I didn’t know why, but part of me seriously wanted to go with Sissy, not because she needed help or even company, and definitely not because I wanted to sleep at Mama’s. That part of me simply didn’t want to go home.
But Mason was waiting. Maybe once I was in his arms, I’d feel better.
“What the fuck took you so long?” he demanded as soon as I walked in and closed the door, making me jump. I turned to his figure looming in the dark entranceway.
“It’s only been five minutes,” I said, my heart still pounding. “I came straight here. Are you okay?”
“Oh, I’m just peachy,” he said as he turned back for the living room. He certainly didn’t sound peachy. He sounded pissed off. And was that a slur in his voice? “Are you finally going to make me dinner?”
I stared at his back as I dropped my purse on the little table that sat in the entrance. “Are you kidding me? You want me to make you dinner now?”
He turned and took two long strides until he stood in front of me. Towering over me. “Yes, now, Bex,” he said through a clenched jaw as he glared down his nose, his usually beautiful eyes dark and glassy. The sharp smell of alcohol lingered on his breath. “It’s eight o’clock, and I’m fucking starving. You already started it and left a mess, so get your ass in there and finish it.”
My mouth fell open. My fists balled at my sides. My nostrils flared.
“Is there a problem?” he asked.
“Uh, yeah. Are you too drunk to remember what I told you five minutes ago? My mama’s back in the hospital. In ICU, Mason! And you’re worried about your fucking dinner?”
His finger flew into my face, and he shook it at me while he spoke. “First of all, I stopped for two drinks after work. I had a long, shitty day and needed to unwind before I came home to your ass whining about how bored you are.”
I opened my mouth, but he jabbed his finger into my chest and went on.
“Second of all, I called the ICU. Your mama’s not going to die tonight. Someday, yeah, she is. But not tonight. Not tomorrow. Probably not the next day. So, yes, right now, I want some fucking dinner.”
He grabbed my shoulder, twisted me, and practically shoved me into the kitchen. I stumbled, catching myself on the counter.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I yelled.
“I’m hungry, in case you didn’t notice.” He yanked the refrigerator open with such force, the door flew out of his control and the handle banged against the wall, rattling all the jars of condiments in the door. He pulled out the container of marinating pork chops and set it hard on the counter in front of me.
I crossed my arms over my chest, tears burning the backs of my eyes. I’d never seen this side of Mason before. I’d expected to come home to his comforting embrace and soothing words, not to a monster.
“Cook me dinner, Bex,” he ordered.
Was that it? Was he taking his dominant fun a little too far tonight? Well, I wasn’t going to play this time. I wasn’t in the mood, and he definitely wasn’t in the safe zone.
“No,” I said, and I turned for the living room.
His hand clamped around my upper arm, and he spun me around. “I said to make me dinner, Bex.”
He shoved the platter of meat and juices into my hands. I shoved it back at him. “I said no. Make it yourself.”
“Cook for me!” he snarled. “I’ve had a long fucking day. I’m hungry, and I’m tired. Do you have any idea the shit I go through every day? The stress of being a doctor? All I ask is for a nice dinner and some loving when I get home. Is that too much to ask?”
“Tonight it is,” I said through clenched teeth. “Pretend like I’m not here and make your own damn food.”
“After all I do for you—pay your bills and your mom’s and everything—and this is the thanks I get?”
My chest heaved. Tears of anger fell no matter how hard I tried to blink them back. I clenched my jaw and said quietly, “I’m not your fucking maid or your whore.”
“Are you sure about that?” he sneered, and I felt like I’d been slapped. I should have known, though, that he’d eventually throw everything back in my face.
I yanked the lid off the dish still in my hands and threw it at him.
“Make your own God damn dinner, doctor,” I screamed, my voice sounding maniacal as I hurled a pork chop at him. It skimmed by his head but missed. “Or are you even a doctor, Mason?” I threw another, nailing him in the chest. “You’ve been lying to me this whole time, haven’t you? Saying what you thought I wanted to hear so I’d give you some pussy!” A third chop hit his shoulder. “You lied to my mama and my sister, too, you FUCKING IMPOSTER!”
I threw the last one right at his face. When his hand flew up, I thought he meant to catch the meat before it hit him again. But rather than grabbing the chop, his fist slammed into my jaw. Stars shot across my vision. I staggered to my right as pain blossomed over my face. My hand lifted to my cheek, and my mouth fell open.
“Oh, shit, Bex,” Mason said, all anger in his voice gone, replaced by panic. “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry.”
I shook my head side-to-side and stared at him wide-eyed, no words coming. He reached for me. I jerked away and stumbled backwards.
“Don’t you touch me!” I yelled. I spun on my heel, grabbed my purse, and ran out the door.
I flew down the stairs, surprised I didn’t twist an ankle or face plant on my way down as tears blurred my vision. By the time I ran into the parking lot for my car, Mason was yelling after me, making his own flight down the steps. I ignored him, sprinting for my car, glad I’d thrown on my ballet flats rather than heels before leaving for the hospital.
“Bex, please, I’m sorry,” he yelled as he crossed the parking lot. I jumped in my car and slammed the door just as he reached it. He banged his fists on the window. “Please, Bex. It was an accident.”
“Leave me alone,” I yelled loud enough for him to hear me through the window as I cranked over the engine.
“Don’t go
, please,” he begged. “I’m so, so sorry.”
I shook my head, put the car in gear, and gave him the finger. “Fuck you, Mason.”
His face fell. His eyes darkened. “Don’t leave me, precious. Please don’t leave me.”
I turned away from him to look out the back window as I pulled out of the parking space. I threw the car into drive. Mason ran after me in his bare feet and meat-juice-stained shirt, crossing the grassy areas as I made the turns through the parking lot. He ran in front of me, forcing me to stop. Standing in my headlights, he held up his hands. A bluish-white object was in one of them.
“At least take this,” he said as he rushed for my door. “For your face.”
He held up an ice pack. I rolled down my window, snatched it out of his hand, and drove off. As I glanced in the rearview mirror, Mason fell to his knees in the middle of the lane. I told myself not to feel sorry for him.
I held the ice pack against my jaw as I drove, not sure where to go at first. I really didn’t want to see Sissy. If my face was bruising as I thought it would be, she’d ask questions I didn’t have the desire to answer right now or make snide remarks I didn’t have the energy to deal with. But I had nowhere else to go. I knew nobody else here. Tears began streaming so quickly, I couldn’t see, so I pulled into a strip mall and parked in the nearly empty lot. I leaned over the steering wheel and sobbed. My phone kept ringing and then dinging with voicemails and texts. All Mason. All ignored.
Not knowing what else to do, I followed where my heart took me, and that was back to Lake Haven. Back to home. I slowed as I passed the RV park, noticing that Leni’s camper was dark. She might have been working, and I wasn’t going to bother her anyway. A heavy feeling of darkness pressed down on me as I kept on driving into town, not stopping the car until I reached Elizabeth’s house, but obviously nobody was home there either. In fact, the house looked empty, and a For Sale sign was stuck in the yard. She’d actually moved away. All those times she had talked about it, but I never thought she would. If I felt the eeriness of a cemetery at midnight covering the whole town, though, I could only imagine what she felt. Putting the car back into drive, I continued out of town to where my heart and soul were really pulling me.
The trees hanging over the driveway with their dripping Spanish moss blocked out the moonlight, enveloping me in near blackness as I crept the car to the cabin. My already heavy heart fell when the cabin came into view with its little yellow porch light no brighter than a firefly. Ty’s truck wasn’t there. The windows were all black. He obviously wasn’t hanging at home, pining over me.
My chest constricted with more despair as I sat there for a while, hoping he’d come home. I pulled out my compact mirror while I waited and peeked at my cheek as best as I could in the dim light of my car’s overhead lamp. Either the ice pack had worked or Mason hadn’t hit me as hard as I’d thought because no bruise or swelling showed. Only a slight redness that would probably be gone by morning. Thank God and sweet baby Jesus for that.
After an hour of waiting and still no Ty, I was exhausted from the emotions of the day. Had I really been bored out of my mind only hours ago? I drove back to the trailer park, not even checking to see who was at Sullivan’s. I had no energy to deal with a crowd. I’d just needed someone to talk to, maybe to hold me. Unfortunately, Leni’s camper was still dark. I was grateful Uncle Troy had given me a month, after all. Not enough to thank him personally, though. I went straight to my trailer to be alone.
As I lay down on the bare mattress with only a towel from my car to wrap around me, I couldn’t help but think about how my heart, maybe even my actual soul, had brought me here. When shit hit the fan, I’d been drawn here, to Ty, to Elizabeth, even to Leni, who I’d only known for a few weeks, but sometimes felt like forever. My sister and my mama, any of my family, had been the last people I’d wanted to see when I needed someone. In fact, I’d rather be completely and utterly alone like I was now than be with them. The grief of that fact, more than anything that happened today, overwhelmed me.
When the sobs slowed to only sniffles, my phone sounded off again. With a sigh, I pulled it out of my purse, rolled on my back and held the phone above me as I scrolled through Mason’s text messages and then listened to his voicemails. Thirty-seven total, in a little over two hours. Pretty much the same thing over and over: “It was an accident, Bex. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to touch you, just the stupid pork chop. Please, precious, believe me. I’d never hurt you.” Desperation filled his voice. The last message ended on what sounded like a sob. “Please don’t leave me, Bex. I love you and need you too much.”
I dropped my arm over my face and closed my eyes as more tears seeped down my temples. The scene in the kitchen instantly replayed behind my eyelids. And damn if I couldn’t be sure whether he really was grabbing for the pork chop or if he’d intentionally hit me. Either way, things had gone way too far tonight, and coming here was the right thing to do. We’d both needed cooling off. I’d thrown raw, dripping meat at him like I was a damn five-year-old, for heaven’s sake. He wasn’t the only one who should be apologizing, but I couldn’t decide if he deserved to hear it from me. Had it been an accident? I couldn’t think straight about it now, and calling him tonight would be a mistake. Hopefully, morning would bring clearer thoughts. I kept my eyes closed and tried to sleep.
I dreamt about the man who often showed up in my dreams, although he hadn’t for a few months. I’d thought he’d come to life in Mason, but I could no longer be sure. The beautiful man who captivated my unconscious mind was nothing but kind and loving. I could feel his love flowing through my veins, reaching all the way to my soul. A cocoon of warmth surrounded my entire body when he embraced me with his strong arms. His features changed every time I looked up at him, but the love in his eyes never did. Nothing had ever felt so right. So complete. So much like home.
First Ty, then Mason tried to intrude on my dream. Each were full of love, too. Each began morphing into my dream man. But then he’d shake his head and become someone else entirely. Faces that seemed somewhat familiar, although I didn’t know who they belonged to. And as the dream went on, his expression turned to concern. Dark shadows flew over us, closing in on us, pressing in as though to crush us. He screamed out a plea, becoming desperate and then urgent.
“Please come back to me,” he called out with such grief, my heart hurt as I drifted back to consciousness. The forlorn words echoed in my head as I blinked at the bright daylight flooding into the window. And then I gasped. A monstrous figure loomed over me.
I bolted upright, the fog of the dream clearing. Mason stood next to the bed, his face almost completely blocked with the biggest bouquet of flowers I’d ever seen.
“Please come back to me,” he begged.
Chapter 20
I lay on my stomach in bed wearing only a cami and panties, flipping through the Book of Phoenix pages—again—instead of getting my butt up and ready for the day. Jeric had been awake for hours already and had gone to see why Ty wasn’t answering his phone. I took the opportunity to once again study the Book. A thought had awoken me in the middle of the night, and the more I dwelled on it, the stronger it felt true: Jacquelena had created the Book in a past life long ago. All night I kept telling myself it was a dream, but now I didn’t think so. My soul told me I created the Book for us, the Sacred Seven. Well, we weren’t Seven then either, but for those of us who were on Earth at the time—Jeremicah and me, Broderick and Anastasia, and Rebethannah and Nathayden. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember any more than that—not what the Book was supposed to do for us or the clues we might have left in it.
The Book obviously could communicate with us, leaving us short, cryptic messages. But where did they come from? From the Space Between? From another world? Or from us, either from the past or the present? Had I, or all of us, somehow given the Book special … powers?
Huh.
I hadn’t considered the Book as having powers—not in a paranormal way—but maybe that was exactly what we’d done to make it exceptional. Not too long ago, I would have thought any of these ideas to be a bit out there, a little too woo-woo for me, but a lot had changed in the past few months. Our lives were full of woo-woo. So thinking a book that had already given mysterious messages as being supernatural no longer exceeded the realm of possibilities in my mind. And if it had the one power of communicating with us, what else could it do?
I closed the Book and studied the cover even harder than I’d already done, running my fingers over the image embossed into the leather: a weeping willow tree with a phoenix branded into its trunk, which stood on a tiny island with a sea surrounding it and dolphins and other marine creatures swimming in the water. An image of the island over the Gate in Tampa Bay. I vaguely remember stretching the leather over the metal plate to create the embossment. The whole image was enclosed in a large circle and tiny, unfamiliar symbol-like markings surrounded the circle, so faint, they weren’t even noticeable on first glance. Had I put those there, too? I couldn’t remember. Were any of these clues we’d left for ourselves? If so, I hadn’t the slightest idea what they meant.
Sometimes, I wanted to hurl the Book across the room or toss it into the fire. Not being able to remember anything about it was quite infuriating. But not this time. Right now, I was bound and determined to figure something out if it was the only thing I did today.
So, I opened the Book and starting from the inside cover, I reconsidered each page individually, the leaves of paper themselves rather than the words written on them. A watermark of a phoenix like the one on the front cover, which was similar to those branded on our arms, decorated the corners of each page. I saw a flash of a memory of me putting them there, but I didn’t remember why. Did they mean something, or were they just for decoration? Was I supposed to do something to them? With them? On them? Memories dangled on the edge of my mind, out of reach, taunting, like when a word hovers on the tip of your tongue. I felt that the Book was to be used more than to simply write and draw in, but how? Frustration returned with each turn of the page as I found nothing to help me along.